Rovian Ways

Most politicians find the cult of the political consultant annoying, but George W. Bush always seemed to find it very annoying. When he began running for President, he insisted, as candidates rarely do, that all his top advisers work only for him. So Karl Rove sold the business he had spent his adult life building up, went to work for Bush as an employee, and remained one until he announced, last week, that he would be leaving the White House.

This arrangement says a lot about both Bush and Rove. For someone like Bush, with a strong need to feel in control, to tolerate a mere staff aide’s becoming as big a celebrity as Rove shows how deeply he must appreciate Rove’s contribution to getting him elected to office—to the point, perhaps, of doubting that he could win without him. For Rove’s part, the arrangement demonstrates that power and a place in history mattered more to him than money, and that he was a true believer in his boss in a way that most consultants are not. It’s hard not to think that if Bush had insisted that Rove stay on until the end of his Presidency he would have complied; the President, with no more campaigns left to win, must have come to see that the costs of Rove—who, lately, has often been a focus of congressional inquiries and rarely victorious in political battles—were outweighing the benefits.

Before Rove joined Bush full time, he had maneuvered himself into a position in Texas that was about as close as it is possible to get to being an old-fashioned political boss. The state, thanks in part to his efforts, was solidly Republican, and candidates at every level of elective office—the governorship, the congressional delegation, the state Supreme Court, the legislature—begged him to consent to be hired by them. If he agreed, he would run a typically ruthless and hyper-organized campaign, and usually win.

In Washington, Rove’s style didn’t play as well. While he was winning electoral battles—in 2000, 2002, and 2004—he was accumulating enemies. He insulted members of Congress, terrified people who worked for him, and forcefully entered the airspace of executive-branch officials who were used to being left alone by the White House political operation. (If Congress ever succeeds in getting Rove to testify, we may learn that the United States Attorneys were among them.) But it was Rove’s failures to deliver legislative victories on major Bush initiatives like Social Security and immigration and to keep the House and the Senate Republican in 2006 that made him just famous and controversial, rather than that plus unstoppable.

It would be a mistake to think of Rove as an entity separate from Bush. The President has behaved with the same overreaching swagger in realms that weren’t Rove’s as he has in realms that were. It was surely Bush’s decision, after the 2004 election, to spend political capital by launching the grand, doomed attempt to privatize the Social Security program. That plan generally gets credited to Rove, as the war in Iraq gets credited to Dick Cheney, but they are Bush’s failures, and not just by virtue of his having stood idly by while his aides manipulated him. The similarity of his mistakes demonstrates that he really is the decider.

In a city run by people who have spent their lives endlessly reënacting their election as class president, Rove was un-dull: he was the fabulist, boundary violator, autodidact, mean boy, schemer. It wasn’t always easy to tell when he was kidding, or being disingenuous. An example is his professed admiration for William McKinley, one of the country’s least memorable Presidents. Is it just a thinly disguised way for Rove to compare himself to Mark Hanna, McKinley’s Rove and arguably a more important historical figure? Or is it a sign of Rove’s preoccupation with Republican majority-building above all? Or is it just perversity for the fun of it?

Whatever Rove really thinks about McKinley, it’s fair to say that his vision of the good in politics (and maybe Bush’s, too) is rooted in the late nineteenth century, when parties and bosses were at their most powerful, when the federal government was run on patronage, and when the distinction between “politics” and “policy,” and the idea that “partisanship” is bad, hadn’t occurred to anyone but a few patrician reformers. If Ronald Reagan was trying to abolish Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, Rove and Bush were trying to abolish the Progressive Era, which, in their view, had given liberal “élites”—judges, journalists, policy analysts, bureaucrats—an electorally unearned thumb on the scales of government.

Rove never pushed for a policy unless he saw a group of big funders or a significant electoral constituency which it might bring to the Republican Party. Social Security privatization was supposed to attract middle-class people whose pensions had been invested in the stock market; immigration reform to attract Latinos and small-business owners; the No Child Left Behind law public-school parents; and so on. Conversely, Rove was always looking for neglected constituencies—the most important by far being frequent churchgoers—and trying to figure out what mix of government goodies and organizing techniques would bring them into the Republican fold. (He was never a real conservative, except in the liberal-hating sense, because the idea that everybody who participates in politics expects something from government was at the heart of his thinking.)

That’s why for Rove’s opponents to renounce all things Rovian would be to miss an opportunity. He was consistently better than the other side at reaching the groups that felt shut out of politics, usually through local organizing. There are plenty of these groups on the left as well as on the right, but Democrats have let the muscles needed to reach them grow slack. Organizing is hard, unglamorous work; the language it requires is combative, self-interested, and non-seigneurial. It’s no accident that the fortunes of Hillary Clinton, which Rove spent a good part of last week running down, have risen, and the excitement she generates among liberal élites has fallen, as she has become less focussed on a rhetoric of “vision” and more adept at dealing with interest groups, from dairy farmers to preschool parents and wounded veterans.

Also, the kind of interest-group politics that Rove practiced creates a culture of compromise in Washington that, though unlovely to behold, serves as a brake on power. As James Madison, the namesake of Rove’s only child, put it, “The society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority.” Rove’s paradox is that he combined a modestly Madisonian view of political motivation with an overwhelming drive to power. The ego said one thing, the id said another, and the id always won. Trying to be the most aggressive strategist, with the most influence over politics and policy, in the most historically significant modern Administration, finally landed him on the sidelines, the place he least wanted to be. ♦

Nicholas Lemann joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 1999, and has written the Letter from Washington and the Wayward Press columns for the magazine.